I have now posted the practice final and the key to the practice final. The practice final is just what I handed out in class, but with the “Error! Reference not found.” typo fixed. This is not a shining example of a great test, the time just ran out as I was preparing it, and …
Something went amiss with Question 4, part C. This question asks you to transform the structure given in the problem by using the Quantifier Raising rule. It doesn’t say you need to do Tense raising (and the Tense raising rule is not provided), so the structure you wind up still won’t quite be interpretable (contrary …
This is probably relatively clear, but due to a word processing error, Question 6 on the practice final makes reference to “the sentence in (Error! Reference not found.)” being ambiguous. What it is talking about is “the sentence in (8)”.
I’ll add some office hours on Monday, 12-2pm, since I wasn’t able to hold my Friday office hours and because the last homework is due on Tuesday.
The reason I suggested that for Part 2 of Homework 8 you consider a sentence like John did not find Mary instead of the actual sentence (John did not like Mary) is that the intuitions are quite a bit clearer, and make the point a bit more forcefully. This point was made even more clearly …
Continue reading ‘HW8: John didn’t like Mary, but he does now.’ »
In this most recent foray into formal semantics, I started doing something on the handout that I had not been doing before, which is using these “fat brackets.” “What are they?”, you may be asking yourself. Basically, in places where I “ought to” have written fat brackets, in the earlier handouts in the semester I’d …
Yes, once again I feel I really should have made the key right away. Lots of good questions coming in over email. Here’s the response to another one. There is no explicit definition of the interpretation of Present tense on the handout. This is mainly because Past tense seemed more exciting, so I always used …
I was just rethinking the homework Part 2, and I realized that there is a small error in the way I described the problem. Here’s the real issue: In the structure you wind up with for Part 2 (that is, for the sentence #2), one of the following conditions seems to hold: either 1) tense …
Continue reading ‘HW8: A small logic error in my statement of Part 2’ »
At the end of the statement about homework 8, I said that we want to make sure that John did not find Mary is not always true. To clarify what I mean here: In our task of formalizing our intuitions about meaning, we don’t want our semantic system to predict that John did not find …
Continue reading ‘HW8: Making sure that John did not find Mary is not always true’ »
As announced in class, homework #8 is just running through a couple of sentences using the system we went over in class (that is, with the modifications to the syntax, to the F function, with full specification of the evaluations at M,w,t,g. You can either use the definition of past tense on the bottom of …